Meta

But about half of the population still think that the carbon tax will do some good. Why? It is all about “cleaning up dirty coal energy”.

The seeds of public concern were sewn with Penny Wong’s Machiavellian linking of “carbon” and “pollution”. She was assisted by the gross stupidity of the coal industry leadership in promoting nonsense like carbon sequestration as a “clean coal” option. The public naturally assumed “if they need to spend billions to produce “clean coal”, obviously we are now using “dirty coal”. This generation of coal industry leaders is more culpable than the greens – they should have known better – they have betrayed their shareholders, their employees and the nation.

The whole “dirty coal” program was assisted by the continual portrayal by alarmist media and government propagandists of power station cooling towers belching “pollution”. As carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, this is clearly a lie. What is seen are clouds of water vapour with no more pollution potential than wispy white cumulus clouds or boiling dark nimbus thunderheads.

And of course coal is black, thus dirty and dangerous like “a black mark” which is a de-merit point, a “black act”, which is nasty behaviour, “black magic” which is evil sorcery and “the black death” which kills people. What a pity coal was not rare and pretty like that other form of carbon, diamond.

A local climax of this unrelenting black-guarding of coal was a letter published in the Queensland Times of Ipswich, a town founded on coal mining, describing carbon dioxide as “one of many lethal pollutants released by coal combustion”.

In western Canada, a ‘BC Greenhouse Growers Association’ spokesperson said on a radio program to the effect, “most greenhouses consume the available CO2 within the first 1/2 hour of the daytime growing cycle, and thereafter the grower must add CO2 within the greenhouse”.

Therefor assuming a 12 hour daylight growing period, they would add 23 times the ambient (380 parts per million) amount of CO2 to make the plants grow stronger to the desired size, strength and health etc. These CO2 enhanced plants also use less water to grow. If we wanted to green the planet, we should be adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, not less.